News & Features

The world knows about Jésica because of Mack. She is Jésica Santillán, the 17-year-old Mexican immigrant who died on Saturday after undergoing two heart-lung transplants. He is Mark Edward Mahoney, known as Mack, her benefactor, who, charmed by the girl's smile and resolve, championed her...

The family of the teenage girl who died after undergoing two heart-lung transplants prepared her funeral today as lawyers began plotting a legal case. The medical examiner will conduct an autopsy Monday to determine exactly what caused the death of the girl, Jésica Santillán, 17. Ms....

A day after doctors performed a desperate second heart and lung transplant on a teenage girl, they announced she had permanent brain damage and little chance to live. The girl, Jésica Santillán, a 17-year-old Mexican immigrant who came to North Carolina to get a new heart, is in a vegetative...

The Duke University Hospital surgeon who gave Jésica Santillán a heart and lung transplant on Feb. 7 does not recall receiving or requesting information about the donor's blood type, the university said yesterday. The mistake was ''the critical failure'' in a series of events that have left Ms....

Jésica Santillán waited three years for the wrong heart. Today, she may have received the right one, nearly two weeks after Duke University Hospital mistakenly gave her a heart and lung transplant from a donor with an incompatible blood type. This morning, a family anonymously donated the...

With the nation facing a dire shortage of human organs, the case of Jésica Santillán renews long-simmering questions in medical ethics: Should surgeons perform second transplants on patients like Ms. Santillán, whose chances of survival are diminished because they have rejected their first...

Fearing severe brain damage, doctors for Jésica Santillán, the 17-year-old girl who was mistakenly given a heart and lung transplant from an organ donor with the wrong blood type, told her family yesterday that even on the off chance that suitable organs could be found for a second transplant, she...

Jésica Santillán, the 17-year-old Mexican who received a heart and lung transplant of the wrong blood type at Duke University Hospital, became eligible for organ donation through the United Network for Organ Sharing. The network, in Richmond, Va., is a national transplant gatekeeper. It links...

A 17-year-old girl is in critical condition after mistakenly being given a heart and lung transplant from a donor with the wrong blood type at Duke University Hospital in Durham, N.C. The patient, Jésica Santillán, has rejected the organs and is unconscious and on life support. Doctors say she...

On a gray morning in Minneapolis, Tammy Hoff and Dormae Gebhardt sat in adjacent hospital beds making brave jokes with their husbands while waiting to be wheeled off to the operating room. It was a typical hospital scene, except for one detail: the two women, both in their early 30's, were perfectly...